The Gulf Coast Blog

Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

Georgia Pearle

The Gulf Coast Blog is gearing up for another month-long resident blogger: Help us welcome Lidia Yuknavitch to the GC Blog starting Monday, July 6th. Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novel The Small Backs of Children (Harper, July 2015 ), the anti-memoir…

David Mura

The Schooner Bar By Ed Bok Lee NOTE: Your screen size may affect line breaks in this poem. Click to read it at its home in Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Farther inside this long bar near Lake and Hiawatha, they burn Over beers in the dark, these men and two…

Georgia Pearle

Tomorrow's blog post marks the end of a month at GC Online with David Mura as guest blogger. Our hope in having David as a guest was to engage in the conversations online, not only about artistic craft and process, but also about a larger landscape, about…

David Mura

If in the world of our stories, we as authors resemble God, it is because we visit trials and tribulations upon our protagonists, while we sit removed from their world, watching them suffer, investigating their suffering, rendering their suffering. …

David Mura

On a friend’s Facebook page today, I found a photo of abandoned row houses, presumably in Baltimore, with the caption: “Where were all the folks concerned with Baltimore’s private property when Wells Fargo Bank first pushed sup-prime mortages on Bmore’s…

David Mura

At what point does the social contract end? If violence can be wreaked upon you without cause? If your life can be taken from you while you are unarmed and your murderer goes unpunished? If your rights as a citizen have been taken away simply…

David Mura

Memoir presents a past self--the experiences of that past self and how that self understood those events. But in addition, memoir frequently presents a present self who sees these past events and the past self differently from the way the past self viewed…

David Mura

Note: This is a selection from a larger essay that provides readings of the opening passages from works by Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Shawn Wong, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, and ZZ Packer. About a year ago, I was talking to a younger white writer…

David Mura

Note: In this essay, I am obviously generalizing about MFA programs, and readers no doubt will argue against such generalizing or bring up exceptions; e.g, witness the responses to the New Yorker blog post by Junot Diaz, “POC vs. MFA.” But like Diaz,…

David Mura

When things go wrong with your fiction, you may need to ask yourself: What do the principles of story tell me about what’s missing in this story or novel? What do those principles tell me about what needs to be changed or added? How do the principles…